TABLET MAG
Oct. 7 Was Worse Than a Terror Attack. It Was a Pogrom.
Deborah Danan
January 24, 2024
… It is one that has sparked a debate in Israel that challenges the inclination to draw distinctions between ordinary Palestinian civilians of Gaza—often referred to in Israel as bilti me’uravim (uninvolved)—and their terror leaders…Around 700 Palestinians stormed Barad’s kibbutz of Nir Oz—less than a five-minute drive from Gaza—that day, CCTV footage shows. The overwhelming majority of those, estimated by Eran Smilansky, a member of the kibbutz’s security squad, to be around 550, were civilians. They were largely unarmed and not in uniform. Some of those civilians carried out wholesale acts of terror themselves, including rape and abduction—and in some cases, the eventual sale of hostages to Hamas—while others abetted the terrorists. Others still simply took advantage of the porous border to loot Israeli homes and farms, including stealing hundreds of thousands of shekels in agricultural equipment. READ MORE
NEW YORK TIMES Bret Stephens: The Meaning of Gaza’s Tunnels According to a report this month in The New York Times, Israeli defense officials now estimate that Hamas’s tunnels measure between 350 and 450 miles in a territory that’s just 25 miles long. (By comparison, the London Underground is only 249 miles long.) Some of Gaza’s tunnels are wide enough for cars; some are more than 150 feet deep; some serve as munitions depots; others are comfortably kitted out as command bunkers. Israeli officials also estimate that there are 5,700 separate entrances to the tunnels — many of them with access from civilian houses and some directly beneath Gaza City’s main hospital, which U.S. intelligence agencies say was also used as a Hamas command center.
ARUTZ SHEVA Holocaust survivor: ‘Hamas atrocities many times worse than the Nazis’ 90-year-old Miriam Schlisser lived through the Holocaust and the years preceding it, but the emotional turmoil she has experienced since Oct. 7 has brought her to difficult conclusions. “The murderous Germans were intelligent and gentle. Yona, my husband, carried his brother on the Death March. They would walk at night and rest during the day. He weighed thirty kilos and carried another thirty kilos. If he had put him down, the Germans would not have beaten him, but fired a bullet through him and left him on the side of the road, where someone would collect him and transfer him to a mass grave.”
ArchitectGuy on Israel 